The physical dimension of a feature on a chip is referred to as “feature size.” Reducing the feature size on a chip permits more components to be fabricated on each chip, and more components to be fabrication on each silicon wafer, thereby reducing manufacturing costs on a per-wafer and a per-chip basis. Increasing the number of components in each chip can also improve chip performance because more components may become available to satisfy functional requirements. Some of the Integrated Circuit (IC) chips include Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) devices, which are widely used in applications where fast search on a database is required. These applications may include, but are not limited to, networking, imaging, voice recognition, etc. For example, in network engines, TCAM devices may be used to perform a fast search in the database, corresponding to the header field of any packet, and forward the packet to the corresponding matched address. As the feature sizes on IC chips continue to get scaled down, routing problems may arise for TCAM devices.
Therefore, although existing TCAM devices have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in every aspect.